As the festival comes to a close I have come to the conclusion that what I find most exciting about the entire thing isn’t the films on offer but the sheer joy of seeing so many people getting excited about cinema. The lines that often spread across two city blocks were just amazing and you always found someone to talk to in them – their chatter preempting the films and taking the festival’s ‘everyone’s a critic’ advertising campaign to heart.
The only blights, for me, were the sheer number of screenings that I attended in the poorly managed and uncomfortable Greater Union cinemas. I was nostalgically reminded that this was the first cinema in which I had ever seen a film. It was Disney’s The Fox and the Hound in cinema 6. At the time, the impression that it left on me was a love of the sheer enormity of the image, an obsession with overwhelming and kinetic immersion which stays with me until this day. In the years between, many many years, we have all been treated to better seating than is still on offer there, and while I don’t expect lounge worthy chairs, it meant that if the film was a little dull my attention inevitably shifted to the most relieving forms of fidgeting. Sorry neighbors! Also, their policy of lining people up and getting them to exit via the fire escapes, meant that the festival bar ended up being a totally redundant feature that deprived me of many a possible chardonnay.
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